Arkell's lawyers wrote a letter which concluded: "His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply." The magazine's response was, in full: "We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off."

This has always been a bit stupid argument. If 50% of TPB files were non-pirated material then we could start talking. However if you have a pirate ship on the front page and the great majority of the stuff is pirated, it does not make a big difference if there is an odd Linux ISO there somewhere.

Despite which, even if it were, the links are not copyrighted nor copyrightable.

The site responsible for holding the torrent links (or, possibly more specifically, the tracker) should be considered as hosting the copyrighted material, because without the torrents no file sharing would be possi

I have found plenty of legitimate torrents on TPB. A fellow musician even uses it to distribute his work (his model is to depend on donations and live performances). I am not sure why you find it different from Megaupload. Both are used to mass distribute files (well, the most common use atleast)

Check out The Promo Bay. Loads of artists on there, giving their work away. I would provide a link but my ISP blocked it. Yeah, the BPI is blocking access to legitimate artist's releases and promo web sites.

The 'absolutly pointless' holds though. If that mirror goes down, ten more await. If TPB closes down forever, the exodus of users shall fuel the rise of those already waiting in the wings. There is no way to enforce copyright on the internet as it is, and I would rather see the entire entertainment industry destroyed than sacrifice the freedom and equality the internet provides to all.

That argument would hold more water when talking about TPB if TPB actually hosted links to non-pirated material.

I can tell you haven't been to the pirate bay in the last 6 months. Aside from hosting a whole lot of FOSS torrents TPB also is working with independent artists to help get their music out with their blessing.

But I can understand how you would miss it. No one looks at the biggest thing on the front page.

The different links you see here [pirateparty.org.uk] are links to material that have been on TPB's landing page. Links to material that the artists themselves have put up for anyone to download. Non-pirated enough for you?

Name 3 distinct products, created by different people, that are indexed on the pirate bay and that are not also provided through other avenues which are considerably less infested with infringing content, and which are not, themselves, little more than an alleged "proof of concept" that TPB has legitimate use.

Note that I'm not disputing usefulness of torrents... here, but it's my observation that legitimate torrents that are actually on TPB are (generally) also legitimately hosted elsewhere anyways, and

What difference does it make if it's ALSO distributed through other means? Bit Torrent is a way to share. It provides leechers with a way to give back and also a way to download things much faster than singular providers/hosts can.

No one will convince you of anything contrary to your beliefs. That's just fine. Reality will go on without you.

Things are changing. The events of today are eerily similar to those that precede major changes. But with the existence of political movements in support of change

I explicitly said that I wasn't disputing the legitimate usefulness of torrents. Nice of you to read what I wrote.

There are thousands of legitimate torrents out there, but almost all of these are seeded by their publishers, and there are often direct links to the torrent file hosted on a website that obviously belongs to said publisher.

I *was*, however, disputing the legitimacy of TPB... since, as I said, it does not appear to serve any useful legitimate function.

Name one good reason I should care about the 'legitimacy' of anything on the internet. If and when TPB offers up something I need, I will use the service. If it's convenient, then it is useful. I certainly hope that the pirate party does not back down. Unfortunately the official cable cutters will decide what is 'legitimate'. In a world where entire countries can get knocked offline, it shouldn't be too difficult to deal with TPB.

Here's the dirty little secret Big Media doesn't want you to know; Big Media does not care one bit about pirates or piracy.

Almost every independent study shows the direct results of piracy (EG. the "lost sale") is negligible to the bottom line, and have sometimes even shown to improve revenues for lesser known artists. Big Media did not get to the position they are in by being stupid. What really scares Big Media is a free and open internet.

What most people fail to realize is that the profitability of the media empire has nothing to do with media sales. When mainstream media is owned by 5 conglomerates [corporations.org], they get to decide what's popular and what's not, what issues are talked about in the news, what is and what is not "popular opinion," and they even get to decide who we may choose as our president. This is not some tin-foil-hat wearing conspiracy, you can go to school for this, and learn from the masters of marketing how to sway public opinion. Big Media is not afraid of lost media sales from piracy, they are afraid that if alternative distribution channels of media exist, they will lose their control over popular opinion, and thus the source of their power.

To this affront on our freedoms, there can only be one response: Death to Big Media!

Here's something that isn't remotely secret. I didn't mention big media, nor do I give a crap what big media does or does not care about.

I do, however, care about the ongoing usefulness of copyright, and it's daft to think that epidemic levels of wanton infringement that can occur on copyright because of websites like TPB are not damaging to the value of copyright, as a whole.

Copyright isn't worth dick-all if society will not, as a whole, respect it. Content providers can and most definitely will fin

You conclude that I've somehow bought into "their campaign", when in fact, I am siding with the consumer.

When I refer to the availability of cultural enriching content, at what point did I appear to you to suggest I was only talking about the, as you put it, "poorer selection" of art that the community mindlessly consumes only because it is spoon fed?

I dare say a great deal more than what you may currently be aware is impacted by the value of copyright... and the common man's ability to access is alm

Those who would self-censor their innovations can keep them. Most meaningful innovations in history have had parallel 'discoveries' and the rest, it is not unreasonable to assume, only lack additional discoverers because the original gained widespread exposure sooner than the particular rediscovery time-horizon for that invention.

Copyright is only a useful mechanism in a capitalist system. This is ironic, because it's actually a very severe restriction on free market pressures (as with so much of the critic

You seem to think that the only ones who would self-censor are those with nothing of value to contribute to society. It is society's loss if people censor themselves... to discard it and say that somebody who would do that couldn't have possibly had anything of value to contribute anyways is nothing but a rationalization that might make you feel better, but it doesn't make it true.

We now live in the information age. The old rationales of copyright no longer apply. It is trivial to reverse engineer this day and age. In fact, that's what all the hubub is about. We need a new way of doing things, for a new age. It's up to our generation to make that happen.

I don't mean to suggest that they couldn't in principle contribute something – perhaps even something amazing that otherwise would take decades to arrive on the scene. But I do maintain that we don't need them, and that the net contribution of people with regressive ideas about sharing and cooperation is negative. So no, it's not a rationalization, it's a rational judgement. Society can function just fine without antisocial innovators – and it suffers more for accommodating them than it would fo

Copyright isn't worth dick-all if society will not, as a whole, respect it.

I hope you realise you're advancing both sides of the argument when you state this...?

I'm a writer/photographer/software developer who also consults in IT policy. Copyright, copying and rights of use of creative works on the internet are not only part and parcel of my professional life, they're also things that affect me very directly. But even with my strong vested interest in copyright protections, I cannot deny the reality of the situation: People want to share, and doing so over digital media makes shar

I was not so much suggesting that the right of a creator to be rewarded should be axiomatic, as you put it, as I am of the belief that it should be the right of a creator to, for a limited time, retain control over copies of his or her works, just as they did before the invention of the printing press by virtue of the fact that copying was hard.

I fully realize that it's a wholly artificial constraint, but it is, in my view, this level of control that is what offers most content providers to make their con

... I am of the belief that it should be the right of a creator to, for a limited time, retain control over copies of his or her works....

Fair enough; I'm sympathetic to that. But the main thrust of my argument is that control is granted by society; it's not something that the creator can apply merely by fiat. So my objection is more utilitarian than principled.

Virtually everything I do (except for works for hire and some commissioned works[*]) is released under a Creative Commons license. (See my website's about page - the homepage link is at the top of this comment.) It's a compromise, and slightly awkward at that. Given that I'm inclined

But the main thrust of my argument is that control is granted by society

Absolutely! And it is my contention is that if that control is *NOT* offered, then the content creator will not have any incentive to try to utilize it, resorting to their own mechanisms to control their content, such as through self-censorship, or the use of technological controls... both of which limit the audience that can really benefit from the work.

I think you will be very hard pressed to argue convincingly that a complete loss of copyright would not massively increase the amount of works most people have access to

I've already considered that hypothesis, and concluded it to be false. My reasoning is two-fold. First, it seems to me that if what you say it were true, then a much higher percentage of material that is already freely available would have been put immediately into public domain, rather than being copyrighted at all... which suggests to m

Hoarding knowledge is effectively brain damage for civilization. The goal should be to have all of it available to everyone, everywhere, instantly, at the lowest possible cost. I am talking about real knowledge, like science and engineering. If the entertainment business becomes collateral damage in freeing the world's knowledge, too bad, they can go whine with the former slave owners. Enslaving ideas to the control of one person is as wrong as enslaving people.

Did I say anything that suggested that what I was talking about had even the slightest bit to do with money?

Of course the ultimately goal is cultural enrichment through the availability of a diverse arrangement of works. That's actually the purpose of copyright's existence! It's pretty obvious, however, that the desire to, at least for a limited time, exercise some control over who may make copies of a work, is a highly desirable one to content

I do, however, care about the ongoing usefulness of copyright, and it's daft to think that epidemic levels of wanton infringement that can occur on copyright because of websites like TPB are not damaging to the value of copyright, as a whole.

You've got it backwards. TPB, or at least its widespread popularity, is a result of the value of copyright being damaged. That's why it's only one of the more recent in a succession of similar popular venues, extending back long past Napster. There are probably many

It seems that my phrasing was unfortunate. What I meant is that in certain jurisdictions, downloading certain materials without explicit license from their authors is neither a theft nor an infringement of anything. I wasn't referring to the (non)equivalence of both.

It just so happens that yesterday The Pirate Bay launched a separate site [torrentfreak.com] dedicated to promoting and distributing (legally) the works of some 10,000+ artists. Stuff which has already been on TPB for a while.

Sadly I haven't been able to check this out as I'm in the UK and this new site is blocked by my ISP.

My understanding is that the existing court orders are for specific ISPs (Sky, Virgin, BT etc.), rather than any ISP. Thus even if the Pirate Party is acting as an ISP it would need its own order (or to be brought into the existing ones).

[Disclaimer: I haven't seen the ThePirateBay orders yet - only the ones from the Newzbin2 block.]

I visited Belgium recently. I wanted to go to the Pirate Bay, but it was blocked. I did a quick search for Pirate Bay mirrors and came up with a lot of hits. Including a script that is specifically for mirroring the site http://unblockedpiratebay.com/external/ which you can include on your own website.

So, basically, the whole thing is pointless. Block one site, and mirrors will spring up. (Same as what happened with Wikileaks.)

They probably own one of the hops along the way, so just divert the traffic. Re-route all traffic through the mitm site and log everything, sue everyone. Give RIAA the 2 million+ hits every day and let them go to town. Sue everyone, make it all public and give them everything they're asking for. Then give all that money from the suits back to the artists, they will be so grateful. Throw a million of people in jail and bankrupt all the pirates. IP address = person/family. Sue the fuck out of each and every o

The only theft going on here is the theft of our natural rights to share, and our right to speech. Speech might cause unauthorized sharing to occur.

Sharing of knowledge is a huge social good. We got to the top of the animal kingdom not only through sheer intelligence, but also by harnessing our great intelligence through cooperation. Sharing of knowledge is a vital part of the cooperation that has enabled us to work together. Over the past few decades, these greedy fools have tried to make themselves the gatekeepers through which all sharing passes. They can't see or don't care that if they somehow succeeded, they would slow progress to nothing, and hurt themselves as well as the rest of us. All they see is money. They would deny us the methods we used to reach the top, and which we still very badly need to solve the problems we still face. All the money in the world does you no good if you need something that doesn't exist. Things like cures for AIDS and cancer, knowledge of an approaching meteor of a size that killed the dinosaurs and the means to avert it, tools to deal with climate change and ocean acidification, advances enabling us to colonize Mars, flying cars, and who knows what else. And most of all, establishing and maintaining a tradition of openness and honesty so that real crimes can't be hidden.

Fortunately for us all, they can't stop the sharing of knowledge. They can outlaw it, demonize it, viciously victimize a few unfortunates to try to terrorize us all, but not stop it. Sharing should be seen as an act of good and kindness like charitable donations, but even better, and far more common. Instead, these squatters on intellectual "properties" have suckered a lot of people into thinking of knowledge as deserving of the same ownership and handling as real, physical property. Getting people to use the very term, "property", and to make the association with "theft", was huge. It's sad how many people are thoroughly indoctrinated with the holiness of ownership, and get extremely moralistic over piracy, defending these villains and their propaganda. But the edifice is cracking. I find the successes of the Pirate Party most encouraging. No matter how this latest issue plays out, it will be good publicity. Keep it up, PP!